Robert Ballard Quotations

If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years.

Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more exploration ships down there during Captain Cook's time than now. It's amazing.

Follow your own passion - not your parents', not your teachers' - yours.

I am an underwater explorer, not a treasure hunter.

So, you know, I think the age of exploration is just beginning, not ending, on our planet.

Forever may it remain that way. And may God bless these now-found souls.

Well, when I was a kid, I grew up in San Diego next to the ocean. The ocean was my friend - my best friend.

There's a long list of technologies that have now made it possible to carry out very precise search efforts in the deep sea.

It is a quiet and peaceful place - and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest.

There are more active volcanoes beneath the sea than on land by two orders of magnitude.

There's probably more history now preserved underwater than in all the museums of the world combined. And there's no law governing that history. It's finders keepers.

You don't go to Gettysburg with a shovel, you don't take belt buckles off the Arizona.

Fifty percent of our country that we own, have all legal jurisdiction, have all rights to do whatever we want, lies beneath the sea and we have better maps of Mars than that 50 percent.

I think the most important thing people can do to save our planet and the human race is to empower women!

I believe in just enriching the economy. And we're leaving so much on the table, 72 percent of the planet.

I mean, there is amazing amount of oil and gas and other resources out beneath the sea. It's staggering.

I would have to say my favorite place on Earth is Bora Bora.

It's not a huge surprise that there are habitations at the bottom of the Black Sea.

What drives me is exploration with a purpose, more the classic Royal Geographical Society genre.

I'm a geophysicist and all my earth science books when I was a student, I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. We learned of Marshall Kay's geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap.

Almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range and we didn't enter it until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon. So we went to the moon, played golf up there, before we went to the largest feature on our own planet.

Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that's a big ice cube. But then it started to melt. We're talking about the floods of our living history.

So, I'm able to network experts on demand, when I need them.

I am really dedicated to understanding the planet/creature on which we live and know that means I must go beneath the sea to see 72 percent of what is going on.

If the thunderstorm parks itself above the summits, there's a good chance for snow.

Our chances for rain are diminishing and it looks like that will hold. We're sort of at the tail end, not out of the woods yet. But overall we're doing pretty good.

The threat from flash flooding is diminishing rapidly. We're not completely out of the woods, but we're on the right path.

No scientist will sit on (a ship) for that long, reading a book and eating popcorn for the whole time, no way.

This is an unusual and dangerous situation. We really want to stress that to people. It's not going to take much to bring a wall of water sweeping down one of those mountains.

They found a fragment, big deal. Am I surprised? No. When you go down there, there's stuff all over the place. It hit an iceberg and it sank. Get over it.

Everything I'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school ... not even in my college textbooks. I'm a geophysicist, and [in] all my Earth science books when I was a student - I had to give the wrong answer to get an A.

Great is the person who plants a tree knowing he will never sit under it.

If you plan it out, and it seems logical to you, then you can do it. I discovered the power of a plan.

Everyone is an explorer. How could you possibly live your life looking at a door and not open it?

I am really dedicated to understanding the planet/creature on which we live and know that means I must go beneath the sea to see 72 percent of what is going on.

The Titanic will protect itself.

Don't confuse facts with reality.

I can't travel without Sudoku.

I love all of the Earth.

The body is sort of a pain. It has to go to the bathroom. It has to be comfortable. But the spirit is indestructible. It can move at the speed of light.

I prefer sayings over jokes.

You can only inspire when you give people a new way of looking at the world in which they live.

I mean, technology is amoral. It has no morality.

Why are we ignoring the oceans? Why does NASA spend in one year what NOAA will spend in 1600 years? Why are we looking up? Why are we afraid of the ocean?

My family came in 1635 from England and settled in Williamsburg. Shortly after, they split up; half went to New England and half stayed in Virginia. I'm a Virginian Ballard.

The DEEP SEA has more history in it than all the museums of the world-combined.

Most of the time you are growing up, people tell you what's wrong with you. Your coach tells you, your parents tell you, the teachers tell you when they grade you. I think that's very good in the early stages, because it helps you then develop skills. But at some point in your career, generally I think when you are in your teens, you look in a mirror and you have to say, despite all the bumps and warts, "I like that person I'm looking at, and let's just do our best."

I would not let an adult drive my robot. You don't have enough gaming experience. But I will let a kid with no license take control of my vehicle system.

NASA's annual budget for space exploration could fund NOAA's budget for ocean exploration for 1600 years.

You don't let a historic site rot.

Fifty percent of the United States of America is underneath the ocean. And we have better maps of Mars than those areas.

The fact that this chain of life existed [at volcanic vents on the seafloor] in the black cold of the deep sea and was utterly independent of sunlight-previously thought to be the font of all Earth's life-has startling ramifications. If life could flourish there, nurtured by a complex chemical process based on geothermal heat, then life could exist under similar conditions on planets far removed from the nurturing light of our parent star, the Sun.

My final question: Why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea? Why do we have programs to build a habitation on Mars and we have programs to look at colonizing the Moon but we do not have a program looking at how we colonize our own planet, and the technology is at hand!

Remember to always dream. More importantly, work hard to make those dreams come true and never give up.

The deep sea is the largest museum on earth, it contains more history than all the museums on land combined, and yet we're only now penetrating it.

The greatest discoveries all start with the question "Why?"